


Ruins

by Asynca



Series: Ready, Set, Go! - Speed Prompts [24]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-09
Updated: 2016-11-09
Packaged: 2018-08-30 02:50:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8515669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Asynca/pseuds/Asynca
Summary: On this day every year, Angela remembers what was, and what could have been. Speed prompt, written in 61 minutes.





	

Every year for six years, Angela returned there. As the days shortened, the leaves turned and the wind began to bite, she knew it was time: November 10, a date she would _never_ forget.

The date she watched everything she’d hoped for, everything she’d dreamt of blow up in a mushroom-cloud of smoke and flame, lit by the people she loved and trusted.

The Swiss Overwatch HQ was abandoned and overgrown; a new Chernobyl. After the UN and the International Security Police had picked though the site clean for clues and bodies, no one went there. No one trusted her experiments, and no one thought it was safe. So it sat untouched, untrespassed, for six years.

This year, on November 10, Fareeha came with her.

They’d been chatting as they left Bern; singing to the radio, planning their New Years’. As they drove further into the mountains, though, their mood sobered. When they turned off the highway towards the site entrance, they were silent.

The road to Swiss HQ was overgrown with branches; Fareeha had to drive carefully to avoid scratching the car. Orange and red autumn leaves fell all over the windscreen and made it difficult to see the road, and when the road ended at the broken security gate that hung off its sprung hinges, Fareeha stopped.

Ahead of them, what had once been the magnificent Swiss HQ, a beacon of medical research and life-improving technology, was now in ruins. Covered in moss, in vines. Birds nested in its blackened awnings.

“I still remember how it used to look before,” Angela confessed.

She closed her eyes for a moment, remembering. Remembering the first time she’d set foot here: her _excitement_. Her joy. All the research she was going to do here, all the lives she was going to save! She’d looked up at that shining building and felt _part_ of something. She’d felt part of something that was going to make the world a better place.

When she opened her eyes again, it was to ruins.

“I saw pictures,” Fareeha said quietly. “It was beautiful.”

All Angela could remember was the hope she’d felt when she’d first set foot inside those doors. “Yes,” she said. “It _was_ beautiful.”

They switched off the car and alighted; setting foot in the deep bramble and long grass.  It was a tough slog up into the building, and it probably wasn’t safe to walk inside: it was only partly collapsed, but neither of them hesitated to walk in through those doors.

Birds took flight in panic as they entered; shards of cool autumn sunlight streamed in from the missing roof. In the entrance hall there familiar fixtures: a reception desk. An office chair, on its side. Someone’s glasses; a vase. Evidence this had once been a workplace. The sign on the wall behind reception had half fallen off, it used to read: _Overwatch Medical Research: Protecting Communities, Saving Lives_.

Angela recalled the first time she’d felt her lips form those words, and she reached up to touch the faded letters with her fingertips. “I was 17 years old when I first read this.”

Fareeha had a wry smile. “Twenty years ago.”

Angela gave her a look. “Oof, thanks for reminding me.”

Fareeha chuckled, and followed her on a slow pilgrimage through the entrance hall into a back corridor. Here, there was still a roof. Angela could see her eyeing it nervously as they walked inside.

Angela wasn’t afraid. She’d been here six times before since—and before that, she’d been here a _thousand_ times before. Even through the cracked linoleum, the debris and the dirt, she knew each step. Her legs measured a distance she could walk in her sleep, into Lab 1.19. Her name was still on the door, _Dr A Ziegler_.  

She stopped by it. “This was already on the door when I came here for the first time,” she said, smiling at the memory. “The Dean of Research led me here, and when I saw this, he said, ‘We’ve been waiting for you, Angela’, and inside,” God, here came the tears, “inside, they’d already set up my lab for me. With everything I’d had at the Queen’s hospital, but _better_. I had assistants, they all smiled and welcomed me. I had a receptionist. I was 17 years old, and all these people where smiling at me and telling me how excited they were to work with me.”

She walked into her lab, closing her eyes and remembering it.

“It must have been wonderful.”

Angela nodded. “For the first time—the first time in my life—I felt I was exactly where I was supposed to be. All the puzzle pieces had fit into place. I was here: and all these people were going to help me _change the world_. With my research, no child would ever know what it felt like to lose a parent. There would always be someone to tuck them in, wish them goodnight, and tell them they were loved.”

The picture before her now was a stark contrast: a destroyed lab, shattered glass, smashed and burnt fixtures. At her feet, there was a jar; she bent down to pick it up. The label was burnt, but it read, ‘ _nano-tech: s10891’._ Angela knew that number well; that was the ‘Angel’ number. The high-affinity lactate synthesis that temporarily stopped cells from cascading to apoptosis. Her greatest discovery.

The whole centre had gathered to congratulate her when she’d revealed it. She would have been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize if they’d ever managed to get it into proper testing, she knew. The Dean of Research even said that in his speech at the huge party the centre had thrown for her afterwards.

Everyone had been patting her on the back, and when they’d led her up on stage and _all cheered_ for her, all five hundred of them with raised glasses, she’d looked down at all those faces—parents, most of them—and when realised their children may never need to suddenly lose them, she’d _cried_. She’d cried for all the children that would never have to suffer the childhood she did. She’d cried to think that unexpected death, that unexpected _grief_ , could be _history_. That people could feel safe knowing the people they loved would always be there.

It felt like so long again. Before the explosion.

Before all her technology was unceremoniously ravaged and destroyed, and then her lab was left to rot while her name was dragged through the media. Dr Death, they’d called her. The insidious reference had broken her heart.

Now, all that was left of that era was this jar with a little code on it, a broken building owned by a decommissioned organisation, and her memories. Trapped in her head, with the synthesis process for the ‘Angel’ tech.

Fareeha was standing at a unobtrusive distance, looking over her shoulder. “Do you still remember your research from here?”

Angela nodded. “Every formula.”

Fareeha nodded. Then, tentatively, she stepped forward and put a warm and comforting hand on the small of Angela’s back. “Will you go back to it, you think?”

She knew the answer, as painful as it was. “I have to,” she said, looking down at the little jar, out at her ravaged lab, and then across at the woman who loved her. “I just have to start all over again.”

 

 

 


End file.
